Evaluation of E-Commerce Product Reviews Based on Structural, Metadata, and Readability Characteristics

Online customer reviews have important role in buying decision process. Nowadays, there are a lot of customer reviews available in online marketplace so that customer can read those reviews for better understanding about product or service that they will purchase. Customer online reviews become important complementary information besides product description, expert reviews, and recommendation from the system. However, due to abundant reviews, it become unclear whether these reviews have good quality and useful for other customers. Based on a survey, 87% customers will read at least 10 reviews before deciding to buy product. New online customer reviews might have good quality but since it wasn't popular yet, the reviews will be missed by other customers. Therefore, it is necessary to evaluate the quality of customer reviews. Quality evaluation can be done based on three characteristics which are structural, metadata, and readability. Final calculation is being done using weighted sum. Feature that mostly affects quality rating of consumer review is the score of readability characteristics.